Feerate Percentiles

Bitcoin Feerate Percentiles.

This chart shows historical median daily feerate percentiles for the Bitcoin protocol. The data represents a daily aggregation of all blocks. This data was extracted from the blockchain using the bitcoin-cli getblockstats command.

Each block contains a list of transactions, and each user had to pay a fee to the miners to get their transaction added to the blockchain. Transactions take up space, and blockspace is limited 4 million weight units (or approx 2MB) per block. The fee to get a transaction included in the next block is determined by the size of the transaction AND the feerate. The best way to think about the feerate is the cost in satoshis per weight unit of block space. It’s like paying for office space - the monthly rental price is determined by the rate and the size of the office in square feet. Miners decide which transactions to include in the next block based upon the fee they pay - the higher the fee, the more likely your transaction will be included in the next block.

Therefore, each block has varying feerates for all of the included transactions. We can then order those transactions and calculate the percentiles, along with the minimum, maximum and mean feerate for each block.

The percentiles are in sats/vByte. This can be interpreted as the percentage of transitions which are equal to or fall below a certain value. For example, a 90th percentile value of 18 sats/vByte indicates on average 90% of transactions for that day were less than or equal to 18 sats/vByte (and 10% of transactions were greater than this value).

The toggle buttons above the chart can be used to overlay block-level feerate aggregations. This value represents the min, max and mean feerate for each block, which has then been aggregated again to the daily level. For example, toggling the “Average Max” button will overlay the median daily max feerate for all blocks. Therefore, this value does not represent the absolute maximum feerate for that day, rather the median of all max feerates for each block that day.